Journalists as far away as London and Melbourne had a high time pawing over the strange family and gawking at the wives, who came to court covered from wrist to ankle in chaste frontier calico dresses. But beyond the bizarre legalities of the affair, I believe Green’s case says a lot about America. At the very least, it is a vivid refutation of the all-too-American tendency to see the past as past, to view history as irrelevant to the present. Mormon Utah renounced polygamy 111 years ago; Green’s robust 21st-century variation on Mormonism belies our ingrained conviction that the passage of time and a few statutes can reverse beliefs that are decades old, if not more. Suppressed and condemned, polygamy has not gone away. It’s simply hidden. An estimated 20,000 to 50,000 people live in polygamous families in the United States, more than half of them in Utah.
The Green case is the third I’ve followed for NEWSWEEK since 1998. That year, a 16-year-old girl from a polygamous sect called the Kingston clan was beaten unconscious by her father for refusing to become her uncle’s 15th wife. Far from hiding out in the desert, the Kingstons ran a $150 million business empire right in the suburbs of Salt Lake City. Last fall, amid the remote red-rock cliffs along the Arizona-Utah border, nearly 1,000 children of polygamy bolted the public schools after religious leaders preached that the schools blocked the teaching of what church elder (and town mayor) Dan Barlow called “our heritage.” I interviewed Barlow at city hall. He wouldn’t admit to polygamy, but he allowed that he’d set up a private school on his property that had more than 100 students. Oh, I said, you’re letting the neighbors in, too? No, said Barlow blandly, “just my family.”
I’ve learned that mainstream Mormons have complex feelings about this underground life. They don’t believe in it and don’t live it. Their church tells them it’s wrong and, in fact, excommunicated Green years ago. Many are as appalled as any other American by the reports of incest and child abuse from within polygamous sects. But they have a hard time equating plural marriage with those evils. One reason is that many come from families that were polygamous just a few short generations ago–among them Sen. Orrin Hatch and Gov. Mike Leavitt. Often they’ll begin interviews by noting, “Brigham Young was my great-great-grandfather.” Granny and Grandpa weren’t criminals. It follows that many folks in Utah aren’t as quick as outsiders to blame polygamy for the abuses it masks.
Utahans are also Westerners, people with a wide respect for individual liberty. More than most places, the mountain West still lives by the creed “Leave me alone, and I’ll leave you alone.” And all Americans get squeamish when the government cracks down on any practice remotely connected to religion. When the Kingston beating sparked a cry for prosecution, Governor Leavitt at first opined that perhaps charges weren’t possible because “these people have religious freedoms.” Never mind that polygamy is illegal in all 50 states, and that courts limit religious observances that endanger or harm children and others. Another restraining factor: prohibition has a checkered history. In 1953, government agents raided the polygamous Utah-Arizona border towns, sending the fathers to prison and carting off 260 children to foster homes. The spectacle of so many broken families virtually ended prosecutions for 50 years.
Green is guilty of one very modern American failing, I think: addiction to TV talk shows. Prosecutor David Leavitt, the governor’s brother, told me last fall the case came up only because Green and his clan virtually confessed to the charges with repeated appearances on TV, from “The Jerry Springer Show” to “Judge Judy.” At trial, infotainment morphed into evidence: “I’m the father of all these children and the husband of all these wives,” Green bragged to a French interviewer. The cost to Green of what he’s called “a little bit of heaven on earth” could be sky high. Found guilty on all counts, he faces a maximum 25 years in prison–and further charges await.
The cost to Utah may be great as well. With the 2002 Winter Olympics coming up, boosters hoped for an unrelieved stretch of good publicity. Then came Kingston, followed by an Olympics bribery scandal, now Tom Green. Personally, I’m not bothered by that. Let Utah take its lumps. If the polygamy mess gives the lie to anything, it’s that America has become a homogenous mass of conformists. It hasn’t. Green and Utah are full-color proof–and in that, I can almost take a perverse comfort.
